2.05.2018

A Mixed Bag of Bombs

In his State of the Union address last week the president
said he wants to build more and better bombs in response to Kim Jung Un
continually threatening to drop bombs on us

Sanepeople know both
sides are engaging in crazy talk. Specifically, the Science and Security Board
of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
has announced its “Doomsday Clock” now reads at two minutes to midnight.

But belligerent bullies in high office are not the only
threat we’ve faced lately. It turns out that the erroneous January 13th
Hawaiian missile attack alert was not caused by an employee mistakenly pressing
the wrong button, as was initially reported. Instead, he received an alert
message which contained the scary wording “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO
HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”

He was supposed to notice that this was preceded by the word
“exercise” repeated three times, but understandably he overlooked that when he read
“this is not a drill”—a phrase that had never been included in earlier practice
exercises. He pushed the button he thought he was supposed to.

So we’re faced with two kinds of nuclear war threats: crazy
and stupid.

As I’ve noted before, the prospect of nuclear war is almost
unbearably difficult to think about, and Americans have engaged in all kinds of
maneuvers to avoid seriously confronting it. Sometimes it can only be
entertained in satire, as in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 anti-bomb satire Doctor Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop
Worrying and Love the Bomb. Unfortunately the film did not stimulate any
widespread agitation against the nuclear threat, partly I think because it made
nuclear catastrophe seem inevitable.

We’re dealing with language here, so I thought I’d focus for
a bit on the word “bomb” itself. Note that the film title uses the phrase “The
Bomb” to mean specifically not only nuclear weapons, but the explosion of
nuclear weapons—a usage common in the previous decade.

All that said, “bomb” has a host of other meanings. I
started musing on this subject when I heard a commentary on Trump’s attempt to
impose high tariffs on Canada’s Bombardier aircraft, in defense of Boeing
Corporation. I used to fly on Bombardiers fairly often, and always wondered why
a civilian aircraft would be named after the air combat officer responsible for
actually dropping bombs.

Turns out “Bombardier” was the name of the founder of the
aircraft company, a Francophone Quebecois whose most famous invention was the
snowmobile—in which you could go bombing
along a slippery winter trail. The family name is in fact derived from an old
French expression for a good (bon)
guy.

So, friendly—not hostile.

Then my mind wandered to the old-fashioned slang expression
“blonde bombshell,” used to label a sexy woman, and realized that a movie
starring a bombshell could itself be a “bomb” (flop).

Of course 90s slang gave “bomb” a positive sense, usually
rendered as “da bomb” as in the enthusiastic expression “you da bomb!”

A bombshell can also be a surprise. Time bombs can threaten
nasty future surprises. The phrase “ticking bomb” has the same meaning.

Reckless politicians are often called “bomb throwers.” In
their threatening speeches they may indulge in “bombast,” but it turns out this
is a word for a kind of cotton-wool stuffing, and signifies a sort of
rhetorical padding: “inflated or turgid language; high-sounding language on a
trivial or commonplace subject; ‘fustian’; ‘tall talk’” [Oxford English Dictionary].

I thought of a couple of culinary uses with savory
connotations: the French globular dessert called a bombe and the “Lancashire Bomb” made by Shorrocks Cheese which
comes as a ball of cheese coated in black wax with a protruding “fuse.” It
seems designed to resemble the cartoon bombs traditionally associated with
crazed terrorists.

Certain illicit drugs have been called “bombs.” Oddly
enough, the Cassell Dictionary of Slang notes
that “bomb” has been also used to mean both “a dilapidated, run-down old car” and
its opposite: “a fast car.”

But these are mere distractions. Meanwhile, we’re stuck with
a president who seems enamored of both feminine bombshells and literal bombs, and
who engages in rhetorical bomb-throwing of the most dangerous sort.